


Hold on Tight (We'll be Bright)

by orphan_account



Series: Courage [2]
Category: Warcraft (2016)
Genre: Gen, LionTrust, M/M, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-30
Updated: 2016-09-30
Packaged: 2018-08-18 15:35:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8167018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Once, when you were a child, (before the rules and before those green, burning, burning eyes and before the after) there was only you and the humming beneath your fingertips.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Khadgar POV, this is gonna be a long one. Might replace this in the future as the tone doesn't feel quite right yet.
> 
> Also, head-canons abound.
> 
> (I'm totally winging this out now in the hopes of getting past this awful, awful block I have with fiction)

_You didn’t believe that what you were doing was magic, not really. Everyone talked about magic as if it were your arithmancy studies, all clinical precision and rigorous control. It sounded cold and stiff._

_No. You believed, with all of your five-year-old acumen, that what you had was something **different**. Something alive and warm and throbbing, like the light that danced around the windows or the dust motes in their eternal drifting. _

_You were sure of it. The sun rises every day, you have to eat vegetables to grow tall, and this – this hum of energy, white-bright and breathtaking; the nerve endings of your fingers burning from the searing intensity of it – is not magic. Magic is not alive, but this is. It ebbs and flows into you, enveloping you with its presence. It changes from one moment to the next, going from the roaring, unadulterated rush of power to the playful, gossamer threads of reality that always seem to be just beyond your reach._

_It always responds to you, and you aren’t quite sure how or why. You are all instinct and gut-feelings, and the other children are wary of it. Of the gleam in your eyes (too bright, always too bright) and the way you glide through the world as if you were parting the air molecules in front of you._

_You don’t move like them. You don’t act like them. You don’t even breathe like them because they can’t **feel** it, the way it hangs in the air, electrifying and invigorating and _ oh, oh, oh, _you could spend hours and days and weeks simply breathing it in. The sensation of it reminiscent of the swoop in your guts when your father threw you high up in the air, always reaching, thinking, higher, higher, higher._

_There is no need to be like them anyways. There is only you, the birdsongs, and the static beneath your fingertips; the absolute feeling of your chest about to burst from it all. There’s so much and you want to show everyone its wonders, want to show how you could make pain go away, want to show how it makes you happy and content. But your insides always go wobbly every time you attempt to show it, so you remain silent._

_But then father begins to smile in a way that is not-smiling, and mother’s eyes become hard and brittle, something soft slowly crumbling inside her._

* * *

 Once, Khadgar thought, he would’ve hesitated before doing this. He doesn’t understand why, only that — in the time before the world drowned beneath the birdsong that made everything feel stark-white and crisp — there had been a feeling of a boundary of sorts. A feeling if stepping into a threshold wherein he wasn’t sure if he was welcome.

There is nothing but the song now, however, the song that made everything feel heavy and smooth and _good_. Khadgar sways and lilts, a nova of light flinging itself outwards even as once dead fish begin to flop their bodies up, and up, and up.

These were simple days. Days where he danced to the song of the birds and created life with the melodies.

* * *

  _Little fingers peek out of a doorway as a brown eyed child’s head leans into the room._

_“Daddy?”_

_“Hmm?”_

_“I can make the hurt go away now!”_

_“Oh, can you now?”_

_“Yes! Look, look, I’ll show you!”_

_Little fingers hover above light particles as eyes the color of molten gold look up into his father’s wide eyes._

* * *

 “Khadgar, look, this is what’s best for you, its is where you belong. You — you have to go, it’s too dangerous otherwise.”

Father’s face is smiling but his voice is too breathy, the syllables being swallowed up and the words coming all garbled. Khadgar doesn’t know why he has to go away, only that _it_ isn’t enough.

It is never enough.

At the side, his mother is looking on, her face pinched but her jaw tight, and her eyes are already sinking into themselves. He doesn’t know where his siblings are. He doesn’t know the place where everything can be made alright. Khadgar doesn’t know a lot of things, he finds.

He nods because this, this, he understands. Because father’s face is twitching with his silence, because mother’s throat is bobbing up and down and up again, because his throat feels too hot right now, tight and constricting; all the words are lost, scattered inside the twisting of his insides. He nods because maybe father will smile again, because maybe mother will stop resembling the sand castles at the beach slowly being eroded away by the sea salt.

Because this, at least, he understands.

Father’s eyes shutter close and his shoulders unhinge themselves as if a pebble blocking its cogs was finally removed after many long years of malfunction. Khadgar shifts, his weight going from one foot to the other, and the fire beneath the chimney sputters – embers showing before it returns to normal. No one notices. No one has ever noticed the fire beneath the chimney that never seems to die out, keeping everyone in the manor warm all year long.

* * *

  _“Hello, Khadgar.” The man’s voice does not boom across the room, but it is all encompassing, still, the kind of sound that sinks deep into your bones and stays there._

_His name is Antonidas and he is tall and powerful and intelligent. Antonidas knows the way each and every detail of a spell works, the enunciation, the gestures, the divine tapestries of the symbols of power splayed out in the air._

_But he does not listen to the birdsongs. His magic is cold and there- there’s no **life** ; none of the dancing waves nor the lilting strings. He does not weave melodies._

_Antonidas’ face is impassive and relaxed, and you wonder if that is how you’ll end up one day. Cold and sharp, like needles and rotten pine cones._

_He makes an odd sort of noise, a cross between off-hand and inquiring. You shake your head. It’s all you can seem to do these days._

_“Come along then, there is still much to do. Always, always much to do.”_

_You go towards him as he raises his hands, his bright eyes glowing brighter as waves of azure energy come out of him in ripples. Looking at it, you can see how the magic intersects, reaching out to grasp at something in the distance. Everything is perfectly controlled and reigned in, ribbons of arcane anchored within his palms._

_Then the world is contracting around you, your entire being compressed into a pinprick of light and energy. Matter swirls around you, white and brown and verdant green, and it takes an eternity and an instant before you are once more made corporeal._

_“Welcome to Dalaran.”_

* * *

 There’s a shaft of light shining down on the cracked wall beside him.

“Magic is the manipulation of the energies that are present in nearly all four corners of the world. While there are many aspects to it, we of the Kirin Tor primarily focus on the Arcane aspects…”

Through the cracks, Khadgar could still hear the birdsongs, high and cheery, but it feels muffled. Subdued. The air is stale and he can’t quite breath right, his lungs cannot grasp the particles of wind. It hasn’t been able to in quite some time.

Here, in the city of magic, everything smells of old paper and sterilized steel. The delicate, gossamer strings of reality are rigid and taut with tension. It feels as if the slightest touch would have everything falling apart.

There is no more dancing. None of the wild, raw, and frothing waves of light that shocks him into being.

“While most believe that the elements are of their own kind of energy manipulation, most of them actually fall beneath the umbrella of the arcane.”

Manipulation, control, restraint, the words seemed to drone on and on, the words insignificant. Khadgar already knew what he needed and wanted. He flips through the pages of his book, looks at it with glazed eyes. It’s the same kind that each and every initiate had.

He stops at a picture of a bird and wonders how it would feel like to fly.

* * *

  _They look at you as if you are an amusing pet. An initiate, young and unsophisticated, whispers of how you’re still young, you should be allowed to dream, following behind your footsteps._

_Dalaran is beautiful and mystical and so very cold. Each day brings weaker birdsongs, and it makes your heart tremble, the way the birdsongs are fading. Each day there are whispers about you, the young initiate who has no control over your magic. They look at you and your wild anima and think of ways you can be brought to heel, of ways to tame you and the crackle of ozone and lightning dancing across your skin._

_But today is not yet the day of your undoing. These were peaceful, empty times yet. Where you woke up and went on top of the observatory tower of Dalaran to taste the clouds. Sometimes you walked to the edges of the city and sat on top of the ledges, looking down from the floating kingdom and into the vast forests below. Always it is the birds that your eyes would follow._

_Your heart races for the taste of freedom in the wilds._

**Author's Note:**

> If you spot a typo, have a suggestion, and/or comment, it would be much appreciated!


End file.
